My server was dead. Not even a little blink from one of the many LEDs in the system or some other sign of life when putting the power on it. So I figured that replacing parts would be like a puzzle. Is it the power supply? The motherboard? The CPU? Or a combination of any of the parts? Replacing one of them would easily cost me about 100 euro. So I did some math, and figured that hosting was not only a relatively cheap solution, it also has many advantages (that all of you IT people can list better than me).

I went with DirectNIC, since I have been using their services for over 15 years now.

And as you can see, it just works. I had to do some work to restore the WordPress database, since the last backup I had on my NAS disks was from the end of 2015. But with some diskswapping, file copying, MySql-dumping+importing and WP-CONFIG changing it now works.

Since the server is back online (still going strong) WordPress began to nag me again about a new version being available 😛 So I decided to upgrade. WordPress itself and 3 plugins. Worked like a charm. No hangs or freezes. Yay! Guess buying new memory for the server will be on my to-do list right after Christmas.

The server is having problems. Installed an extra NIC, to rule out problems with the onboard NIC, but that didn’t solve the problem. Removed the memory DIMMs now, and replaced them with two out of my desktop machine, since that had 4x4G and I don’t really use it at the moment. So they both now have 8GB internal memory. The desktop memory is Corsair Vengeance, the server memory was some value ram. Hopefully the Vengeance dimms will solve the system freezes.

Yesterday my server, or to be exact: my domain, was unavailable. I completely missed the expiration emails I received, and did not renew the domain on time. That results in the domain being put in quarantine. But I choose DirectNIC for a reason: they are professional and they are quick. So after contacting them and explaining the situation, paying the neccessary fees and boom….within two hours (including the email exchange and lifting the quarantine status and paying for the whole shebang) my domain is back up again.

Thank you DirectNIC. I’ll be more careful next time (next year!).

In the meantime, when the stress levels were at a peak, I bought two other domains, so now you can reach me on switchbl8.com and switchbl8.rocks (!) as well.

You know how internet surfing works. You read something, click on some links, and finally you don’t even know where you came from. Anyways. That made me try WildFly, the AS formerly known as JBoss AS.

And you know the drill. Download zipfile, unpack, goto bin folder and start. Browse to localhost/something.

Can’t find the console. Well shit.

Do you have an NVidia videocard in your system, and did you install all the drivers and stuff? You probably have NVidia Networks Service as one of you running processes. Kill it. Now restart WildFly and browse to the console.

I never noticed that my index.php when browsing to the domain-root (so www.switchbl8.nl) did not work and gave an error 403.

It took some puzzling and because all other stuff worked I knew it must have been since the transition to fcgid (instead of mod_php). I recalled blogging about it, checked my configs for errors, and found one (no plus signs in the options section).

Now it works. It’s not a special page, but it annoyed me that it didn’t work.

On Friday the 13th we had a power outage. Of course. It lasted an hour. After that my whole house came to life again, except….the TV-signal, my landphone and my internet. Correct, same provider. They had problems after the power got back on, and their problems lasted several hours.

I didn’t think I had any problems, everything in the house seemed to work. Except when I tried to get some files of my NAS disk for work. It died. Connected the disk to a Windows machine, my Linux server, tried repairing the disk with a controller of the same type of disk, but none of that worked. The disk was dead. It contained my photos, my music, my documents, all my downloads and some backups. Great. Because of money issues, the disk was not mirrored. And I found that my latest backup of my pictures was….from July 2011.

🙁

I bought 4 new disks.

Two 3TB disks to be installed as RAID1 (mirrored disks) in my server, to be my main storage for pictures, documents and the like. And the NAS gets two brand new 1TB disks, also to be used in RAID1. To make things more expensive, I bought NAS-grade disks, which basically can stand being “on” 24/7.

The NAS disks are now installed and I am gradually restoring my pictures onto it.

The period the missing pictures span was certainly not the best period of my life. But there were some good moments I captured. Guess I have to make up for that in the years to come. Let’s charge the Canon, and start shooting.

This blog is starting to get old 🙂 Next February this weblog will be 10! I think it started with pMachine, then b2Evolution, and after that several versions of WordPress. I know I used some ASP.NET software at first, when the server was still a Windows machine, but “.Text” was not stable enough (reboots made the weblog unavailable), so that’s when I started with PHP-based weblog software and finally ended up with the best one!

Recently I installed a broken-link checker plugin, and that resulted in quite a number of dead links. Some that were links to my own weblog. I “unlinked” most of the external links (so the link is removed), and I am trying to sort out my own links. I restored some pictures already, but disk crashes in the past resulted in some media referred to by the links to be gone. Should have made better backups. Mind the word “should”.

Just changed the server’s Apache model from Prefork to Worker. Should be easier on the memory and the CPU, but after downloading/installing it (via aptitude) nothing worked anymore. PHP works different under the Worker model, so directories need an extra handler and options. No biggie, read this thread.